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Not too much for Matoush Photo by Jim Craven A retrospective of Lyle Matoush's work opened Thursday at the Rogue Gallery in Medford and today at the Schneider Museum in Ashland. The Rogue Gallery is showing a print retrospective; the Schneider features recent pastels plus prints, sculpture and ceramics. Multitalented artist's work gets 2-gallery show By BILL VARBLE Lyle Matoush says making prints and teaching art have a lot in common: "Both begin with what sometimes seems like nothing and end with a beautiful by-product." Some by-products can be seen in art exhibits that opened Thursday at the Rogue Gallery and Art Center in Medford and today at the Schneider Museum in Ashland. The Rogue Gallery is showing a print retrospective focused on lithograph and itaglio. The Schneider features recent pastels by Matoush plus his collection of prints, sculpture and ceramics. The Schneider's Mary Gardiner says the unprecedented linking of exhibits by one artist in the two venues is a tip to the stature of Matoush, a godfather of printmaking in downstate Oregon for nearly four decades. Matoush, 70, his white hair pulled back in a trim pony tail, stands in the Rogue Gallery in front of his most recent print, a lithograph called "Column of Wishful Thinking," (1999, $375) and tries to explain how he does it. "When I get an idea that starts settling in, I go from there," he says. It's a floating orange mass amid a hint of neoclassical columns. He says it started with swirly patterns he made with toner washes made from liquified powders like those of a copy machine. It required the making of seven different plates to be used in seven separate print runs. The first was a "litho stone" or "key plate" of Bavarian limestone, the other six aluminum plates. Matoush's prints grab viewers with their vivid color and formal elegance, but printing makes technical demands, too. "It's a very exacting, disciplined process," Gardiner says. Unlike printing processes in which material is carved away, lithography lets an artist paint directly on stone or metal. Matoush focused on lithography and itaglio (a very old process requiring cutting or etching) for many years but has concentrated more on pastels since his retirement from SOU 1994. It's reckoned that in teaching from 1965 to 1994, he made more than 100 original art prints and taught printing to some 1,800 students. Among them was Linda Pinkham, later a head of SOU's print program herself and now an owner of Pinkham Press, one of a handful of fine-art collaborative lithographic presses in the West. "I think a lot of people were intimidated by his demeanor," she says. "But they learned a lot." Pinkham says she wondered for years how Matoush could have print all over his hands and handle art paper and have it stay immaculate, no ink. She finally saw him go to a spot of talc on his apron with a finger. "The hand is quicker than the eye," she says. For her, the incident underscored his knowledge. "He knew everything," she says. "I still ask him things. He's a big teddy bear." Other master printers mentored by Matoush include Beth Bardossi, now with the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, and Tommi Drake, an art professor at Rogue Community College. Born in Colorado in 1930, Matoush earned degrees from Colorado State College and San Francisco State University and apprenticed under Ernest de Soto at Collector's Press, San Francisco. Along with Glen Alps of the University of Washington and Gordon Gilkey at Oregon State University, Matoush helped revitalize Northwest printmaking in the 1960s and '70s. He's a founder of the prestigious Northwest Print Council. Several themes present themselves in these prints. One is mountains ("I live in Ashland"). Another is the world revealed through the microscope ("microscopic things intrigued me"). Yet another is architecture, crystallized by photos Matoush takes while traveling to destinations such as Mexico or London. He sometimes makes several exposures on a single 35-millimeter negative, then pores over them to see what images emerge. A couple hundred hours later, bingo, another beautiful by-product. Multitude of events celebrate Matoush's art These events are planned in connection with Lyle Matoush exhibits through July 10: 5:30 p.m. today, Rogue Gallery, artist's reception. 5:30 p.m. May 5, First Friday lecture, the Schneider, SOU. 12:30 p.m. May 6, Rogue Gallery, free printmaking workshop. 7 p.m. May 10, Rogue Gallery, artist's talk. 1-4 p.m. May 13, family day activities, Schneider. Noon May 18, brown bag lecture, Schneider. 5 p.m. June 2, artist demonstrations, Schneider. For information, call the Rogue Gallery at 772-8118 or the Schneider Museum at 552-6245. Today's Edition : News | Sports | Business | Weather | Tempo | Classifieds Mail Tribune Copyright � The Mail Tribune 2000, Medford, Oregon USA